This is a transcription of an interview of Steve Dietch, VP, Cloud Solutions & Architecture, at HP Discover 2011 in June that was webcast live on SiliconAngle.tv. In this interview Dietch discusses where HP fits into the evolving public/private cloud infrastructure and what it hopes to accomplish in the next year with Wikibon.org CEO David Vellante and SiliconAnglwe CEO and Founder John Furrier.
DV: You guys are all in on cloud.
SD: We’re all in. It’s all about the cloud.
JF: So the question is Paul McCartney is headlining here, obviously the Beatles. So our theme question here is: Is it “Let it Be” or “Live and Let Die” for cloud services? Are you going for it?
SD: You’ve got to go for it. It’s not a fad. This is a secular trend. It’s going to happen. We’re looking at a large part of our total addressable opportunity is going to be cloud. Enterprise companies, SMBs, are going to have to go there.
JF: Done deal.
SD: It’s a done deal. It’s going to happen. It depends on are people going to take advantage of it, or are they going to get caught flat footed? Because the people who take advantage of it, whether you’re an enterprise or a service provider, are not only going to create more flexibility but more importantly a lot more agility and actually enable a lot of new business models that just weren’t possible before.
JF: So you were a management consultant. HP has been criticized for being slow and not really doing cloud and doing a lot of little pieces of cloud, and having a lot of little stuff in the tool chest. Here it’s a big splash. You’ve guys are actually going to grow this out – we heard execution in the feed – take us through the plans and the big picture, the high-level story around what are you building here, is it fundamentally new transitional products, sets of products? Take us through the blueprint of the cloud services or cloud products.
SD: Yes, so let me address your first point. We have been criticized for being slow or not present. We’re the largest IT company on the planet, so we have to be present in a couple of places. I would tell folks out there that we’ve been doing the cloud when it wasn’t called the cloud. We have a very mature background; we’ve been doing mission-critical computing in the data center, creating a much more flexible, agile environment, our converged infrastructure that you heard Bethany talk about. Converged infrastructure is essentially the underpinnings for the cloud. So we’ve been on that path already, and now what we’ve done is we’ve had a careful, methodical approach, and now we’re coming out. We’re coming from a position of strength, whereas if you look at a lot of our competitors, our major competitors or a lot of the smaller up-and-comers, they’re developing things from scratch with unproven business models or in many cases unproven tech.
We’re bringing together, I would say, market leading technology that’s existed. And we sometimes get criticized for not bringing – we’ve got enough technology, but we’re bringing it together in an integrated fabric to address the cloud.
Now what we’re doing today, what oru CEO Leo Apethecker is saying on stage, is we are taking a very comprehensive approach. We’re not only building an ecosystem or a marketplace or an entire public cloud infrastructure, we’re at the same time enabling our customers to build their own cloud, and melding those things together. And it will all be based on the same underlying technology.
DV: So he [Leo Apethecker] said a couple of things. He said the hybrid cloud is going to be the dominant model, and the second thing he said is that HP is going to announce public cloud. So you just mentioned that you’re going to enable your partners, but at the same time you guys are enabling the public cloud. Talk a little bit about that coopetition mantra in the industry today. How do you expect that to shake out? How do you do both relative to some of the cloud players today?
SD: I think the opportunity is enormous. Depending on who you talk to its $140B or $150B.
DV: Do I hear $175?
SD: $180, $190, whatever it is. We see our job as stimulating that market, creating a bigger pie for everybody as the largest IT company. Helping to accelerate the move to the cloud and realizing that $140, $170, $250B – I’ve seen some estimates that the total market opportunity is close to $300B.
JF: At some point you have to throw away all the numbers – stop analyzing, it’s huge.
SD: It’s gigantic. So to your point, we look at our job as helping mature the market much faster so people can take advantage of it, making the pie bigger and giving not only ourselves bout our partners, our customers an opportunity to take advantage of that.
For example, people can look at our launch of a public cloud as direct competition to service providers or other cloud providers. There will always be coopetition out there. But the way we look at it is we’ll be collaborating with our partners today and helping them take advantage of the cloud in multiple ways. Providing them with the means to go to market with their services through HP. Providing them with greater services and a greater portfolio for them to go sell.
JF: Dave and I were talking about that if HP tries to screw up the partnership equation in their business model it’s too dangerous; it’s too big. The supply chain’s big and you’ve got great partnerships that are fundamental to the business. So totally good points.
SD: The model needs to be open, and this whole idea that Leo was talking about was an open marketplace, where not only will we provide our partners, the service providers – to sell our services but also to utilize our marketplace to sell their wares. Totally open, different stacks….
JF: That’s the sizzle. The sizzle is openness and cloud marketplace. That’s nice sizzle, but let’s talk about the steak, the meat on the bone, the platform and some of the opportunities that the competitors don’t have. The core tack that you have, and where the white spaces are for developers, and where the competition is lacking. You mentioned that some don’t even have solutions. So the sizzle is cool, but where’s the meat on the bone.
SD: So I can give you some examples. Not only are we going to develop this complete cloud stack from infrastructure to platform services for developers to cloud services to the open marketplace, which is unique in itself. There isn’t anybody on the planet that has the capabilities to develop their whole stack as well as keep it open and provide an ecosystem thought process in place. But we’re at the same time going to utilize exactly the same technology, full stack, HP end-to-end, remaining open if a customer chooses not to use all of ours, and use that to help our clients build private and hybrid clouds on premise, which many of them will choose to do because it makes sense economically, security, and so forth.
JF: It feels better.
SD: Everybody’s got a different level of maturity. So we see this as a broad HP providing a complete, comprehensive solution regardless of where you find yourself in the ecosystem.
DV: You’ve kind of got the four horsemen of the cloud. You’ve got Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. That’s the household names. Do you see hp as being one of those household names some day, or is that just a different business?
SD: I see HP being broader and deeper to a certain extent. If you look – I like to look at the cloud from my perspective, and you can categorize what I do as I run the build side of the HP strategy, helping clients build a private or public cloud. When I look at the cloud I look at it in three segments. There’s enterprise customers who are going to build a private or hybrid cloud, there are service providers who are going to build a public infrastructure to deliver IaaS, platform-as-a-service, SaaS. Then there are what are for lack of a better name independent clouds – uber-clouds on a massive scale that do a very small number of things extremely well. And then you can look at the Facebooks, the Bings, the Yahoo!’s, so forth. So to categorize the numbers or names that you cited in that last category, we’re trying to take a much broader view with our capabilities to bring that entire ecosystem together and fatten the pie.
DV: I’ve made the observation a number of times, John, that those guys that Steve’s mentioning – it’s a single app optimized for 100 million or a billion people, versus IT which is hundreds or thousands of apps for 10,000 people.
JF: And they’re built from the ground up, those other guys. So the Facebooks and the Zingas, they’re building from scratch. They don’t have legacy multi-vendor capacity issues.
DV: So they’re two different worlds. So the hybrid cloud that you’re envisioning is still a different world, isn’t it? Or is it mashing together these two different business models.
SD: Actually if you put the build side away for a second and look at what HP’s going to do from a public perspective, we’re going to provide as you go up that stack from the infrastructure, platform services focused on the developer community. So multiple stacks, name your stack, there’ll be different developer tools, different platform-as-a-service offerings. There’ll be cloud services. Those cloud services will target consumer, SMB, and enterprise. So if you look at some of the comparable solutions in the categories I just mentioned, they only take a piece of that. We’re going to try to bring it all together, but we’re actually going to try to become a facilitator and broker for those folks as well. So we could white label out/in.
JF: It’s a rising tide, too. If you look at all the things. We were at SAP Sapphire; it’s kind of a similar thing – big battleship company, they can’t move that fast, like HP. And they have existing business and legacy. So they’re saying, “Hy, we want mobility. And the client says they want that, too. So Siki Gunta from CSC, who’s on the ?? side, she’s agreeing with you. She’s saying, “Hey, cloud’s been around. All these computer people have been doing cloud.” So cloud is disruptive. So my final question is how are you going to see the services business evolve. CSC, the big consultancies, to the boutiques – there’s a lot of boutiques that grew out of the cloud business that now are expanding rapidly – the new school. So the economics are different, there’s a lot of money to be made on the services side, and there’s innovation. So what’s your view on the services, the innovation, and the disruption. Whose weak, what’s the weak areas and the strong areas?
DS: If you look at services as a wide spectrum, from consulting to design, to implementation, to support. Then you actually put the IT-as-a-service wrap around it. Every one of those services companies that are in that, whether you’re a VAR, a reseller, or an outsourcer, system integrator, you’re getting at IT-as-a-service. So everybody’s evolving their business models. The interesting thing is that cloud gives everyone an opportunity to do that. The way I pitch it to service companies is cloud is a leveler. It really provides an opportunity to evolve your business model where that opportunity didn’t exist before.
Now, there’s a lot of companies that may not ride that wave and, as we discussed before, I think they’re going to get left behind. The traditional business may not last for the long haul.
DV: I know we have to wrap, John, but I have one final question for Steve. We’ve seen a lot of high profile hacks – you mentioned Lockheed Martin, several others. Is security a do over in your opinion?
DS: Security is fundamental to the cloud, but it’s fundamental to IT. Is there a silver bullet for security – absolutely not. If you go out and pontificate that you’re secure, you’re probably not, you’ve already been violated. So people need to step back, understand the vulnerabilities in their environment, and give it the best shot they can. I think security will evolve as we go forward and become stronger, more pervasive, and provide a level of protection that probably people can’t envision today. But will you ever get to a point where you’re secure? I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. You’re just going to have to plan for an attack and deal with it in a rapid fire, zero-day approach.
JF: Okay, Steve. Thank you for coming onto the Cube again. You’re alumni, we’re going to put you on the list of multi-Cube attendees. Great to see you again.